Brave and True
by D. M. Evans
Summary: She wasn't sure she was as brave as everyone thought.


Title - Brave and True

Author- D M Evans

Disclaimer - Arakawa owns all

Summary - She wasn't sure she was as brave as everyone thought.

_Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true. – Charles Dickens _

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She had heard the statement so many times in her life: what a brave little girl and then later, what a brave woman. Riza never saw herself as particularly brave except for a few situations. She first remembered hearing it at her mother's funeral. Strangers commended her for the stoic front she put up. Years later, she knew it wasn't so much bravery as it was not truly understanding the finality of death.

Riza heard it whispered whenever she had gone into town, sometimes with her father's head-in-the-clouds young apprentice. The townspeople seemed to assume that her father was a dangerous man and Roy's teenaged arrogance convinced them he was little better. They didn't know the men they were summarily judging on sight. Her father was troubled. Even when he used her skin as terribly as he had, Riza hadn't been afraid. She had merely been sad that her dad was slipping further and further from her reality.

Roy was no danger at all. She always had been able to beat him in a fight, though it was possible Roy had let her win. She was the one who knew how to use the rifle to hunt the vermin the cats didn't get. She was the one who pointed that same rifle at an intruder who came thinking there must have been something worth stealing in their huge old house. That night was probably the first time Riza actually felt brave.

Later, she had plenty of time to test her courage. She tried her best to forget Ishval. Yes, she was good at her job and certainly, it was a challenge; downright terrifying at times. However, she never felt particularly brave. Snipers shot from a distance. In some ways, that could almost be considered cowardice, but only in the broadest sense. It was the word she dug up when she felt bad about herself and worse about what the war had transmuted her into. She had earned two wounded hearts, a bronze lion and a golden star for bravery above and beyond. Riza had them hidden in the false bottom of her mother's jewelry box, one of the things she had put in storage before going into the Academy. She rarely had the stomach to even look at her medals.

In some ways, she thought she was brave having to put up with a room full of men everyday. No, not men, _boys_. Riza wasn't sure there was such a thing as a grown man most days. Certainly Havoc and Roy did their best to prove there wasn't. Fuery was little more than a boy and Breda, if worked up by Havoc, had his moments of male-driven madness. Falman came closest to being a man. She had needed divine intervention on the occasions Hughes made his way to the East or their team was called to Central. Hughes plus Mustang usually equaled her wanting to fire her gun. She should've gotten a medal for not shooting either of them. That medal she wouldn't hide in a hidden drawer. On Hughes's last trip, she had actually named two bullets 'Mustang' and 'Hughes'. She kept them in her pocket, the names written in marker across their full metal jackets. In her defense, they had shown up after a mission, drunk and singing outside her apartment.

Riza mourned Hughes loss, almost as much as Roy. Roy wasn't the same without his friend. She might be one of the few – outside of his aunt and one perceptive, loud and annoying boy-alchemist – who realized Roy had very few friends. His intelligence, his alchemy – most particularly the alchemy she had given him – isolated him from others. It had taken every ounce of her valor to stand in that cemetery with Roy and not let him – or herself – crumble.

Riza considered the possibility that her hard life had been training for this very moment, but that thought could have been spawned by blood loss dulling her mental facilities. She knew she was dying. She saw it in Roy's eyes; his fear, the outright panic. Riza didn't want to die, but there were things she wanted even less. She couldn't let Roy do the most drastic thing he could do to save her. She had already condemned them both when she shared the array on her back. Riza would not let him commit the taboo of bringing her back from the dead. She loved him too much.

Screwing up her courage, Riza wanted to make the last moments of her life count as blood poured from her neck wound. She gave Roy a look, saw his dark eyes change. He understood. He might not be done fighting, but in the end, he would not give in to their demands that he perform human transmutation. If she died here on the floor, Riza could go knowing she wouldn't damn him.


End file.
